CULTURE- Buzzbox- <i>White Light</i> night: Sarah White debuts new CD

Reigning alt-country townie princess Sarah White's latest album will finally be given its due ceremonies with a CD release party at Starr Hill on Friday night. She's particularly proud of White Light.

"I think it makes a strong splash after the Bluebird record and not having put out anything for five years," says White. "I think my songwriting has developed in that time."

For those of you keeping score at home, this means that she's being inexplicably dismissive of one of her own releases, the 2004 You're It EP.

"I wouldn't have called You're It a definitive piece of work," she explains. "Those tracks are not perfect, and they were nothing that was marketed or on a label."

White Light includes remakes of three of those five songs, suggesting that she approved of the compositions, if not the execution. "It was kind of like a sketch, and now there's the full painting," she says. "They were kind of like rough drafts, and I wanted them to be part of the new recording, which was something to be taken seriously as a complete work."

To that end, she says she was a lot more focused and direct this time around than on records past. "I feel like on this one I was a lot more calculating and decisive and knew what I wanted and worked to get it," she says. "I don't really have any regrets about the way something turned out."

Except, of course, for the error which was duplicated across the entire first batch of CD's she received back in the fall, further postponing an album she'd been trying to complete for almost two years.

But in retrospect, she thinks the extra time taken during the process of creation was ultimately beneficial. "I was itching to get it done," she admits, "but in hindsight, it's all right on schedule."

Sarah White and the Pearls perform with Jim Waive and the Young Divorcees in the Starr Hill Cocktail Lounge on Friday, January 19 at 10:30pm. Admission is free.

Sarah White celebrates the release of her second full-length album White Light with a Starr Hill release party on Friday, January 19.PUBLICITY PHOTO